A Giant Day

Working in television news, I get a lot of perks. Just this week, I got to tour a San Francisco home on the market for the low, low price of $45 million dollars. You can click on the link to see what you get for that price. Notice you won’t see an updated kitchen and bathrooms for that price.

I also got to see this guy up close and personal.

Giants Relief Pitcher Brian Wilson

Yep, that’s Giants relief pitcher Brian Wilson and I was within spitting distance of him. He’s one big dude, and I’d fear the beard even if he was pitching to me. Now I’ll admit, I’m not a huge baseball fan. I like to jump on the bandwagon, and I took the leap just in time last year as the scrappy San Francisco Giants clawed their way to becoming the World Series Champions. That makes this year’s home opener a big deal, and NBC Bay Area devoted plenty of resources to covering the event. I was one of those resources.

One of my assignments was to go with photographer extraordinaire, Jeremy Carroll, and cover the raising of the World Champions flag.

Raising the Flag

That’s Jeremy in the lower left hand corner. This was just one of many of our jobs for the day.

The majority of the time, I helped field produce our Giants Opening Day coverage on our 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. newscasts, as well as our hour-long Opening Day special. It helps that I’m not a huge Giants fan because I had no idea of the score until about the 7th inning.

It takes a lot of work to pull off the coverage NBC Bay Area provided, and I was just a very small part of it. We had a lot of people working 12+ hours. In that time my co-workers put up a make-shift set outside AT&T Park, set up lighting, pulled lots of cable so NBC Bay Area viewers could see and hear everything, shot a lot of video, edited that video, reported on the day’s event, and then broke everything down at 8 p.m. in very chilly conditions. The core group of guys who work on projects like this are like a well oiled machine. They’ve done this countless times, and they make it look easy. It’s far from easy though, and often it isn’t fun, especially when you’re forced to use a porta potty that is on the verge of overflowing.

In the end, it turned out to be a great, but long day. The Giants won over the Cardinals, (Sorry babe, your home team isn’t off to a very good start) and I got to be a part of another great team.